Deadlines

All Forum participants (presenters, chairs, discussants, etc.) need to pay the early registration fee by April 10, 2012, in order to be included in the programme. If not registered, their names will not appear in the Programme or Abstracts Book.

Sessions

provisional as of March 15, 2012, in alphabetical order

Changing dynamics of institutions among under-privileged communities

Deliberative democracy: An intercontinental perspective

Voter apathy and cynicism is growing. But also “unconventional” participation is facing a crisis. New social movements often seem to become violent meaningless protest. Are there any alternatives to the “brick or ballot“?
In this workshop on the one hand new forms of "dialogical deliberative instruments” such as participatory budgeting etc. will be analysed. Both democratic channels are seen as an innovation and addition for mainstream traditional democracies. Nowadays democratic innovation seems to be generated mostly in the global South. Brazil and other countries “export” participatory instruments into the old democracies in Europe and Northern America. Here implementation differs. The panel tries to describe best practices and new trends in deliberative dialogical democracy

Local welfare systems in Latin America

There is no doubt about the central role of local governmentas locus of welfare provisions. This issue has been analyzed in the European context, as well as in North America. The analyses of these local Welfare systems show the importance of two main dimensions: substantive (content of policies), and procedimental (institutional arrangements to provide services among different levels of governments). However, the role of local government as service provider regarding social inequalities, its relations with other institutions and the public-private relationships, is a new area of research in the Latin American context.

We propose to analyze and integrate both dimensions (substantive and procedimental) to study local welfare systems in Latin American countries. The aims of this session will beto answer some questions related to the specific situation of local welfare systems in that region, for instance: Which is the role of local governments in service provision? How to define and analyze local welfare system in that region?; are local sphere a favorablestructure of opportunities to canalize citizen’s welfare demands? The session welcome empirical and comparative contributions, as well as methodological proposals about this issue.

We propose to develop this session in Spanish to improve the participation of Spanish speaking researchers from Latin America.